Our Mission

DeafMN.com was created to enhance the MN Deaf Community by providing community members the information they need to interact and participate within our community.
As part of this mission, we consider this entire website an ongoing project. We will continually changing this website to better fit changing community needs. To make this happen, it is critical to have input and participation from the community. Please let us know what we are doing right, what we are doing wrong, and how we can better serve you.

Our Principals:

Empowerment -- focus on making it as easy as possible for deaf citizens to provide their own information in means that are as accessible as possible.

Relevance - provide information that is immediately relevant to the lives of all of our local deaf communities and their needs.

Collaboration - work with disparate organizations and existing media groups to create shared resources and synergies. Building networks, resources and sharing media among other things.

Engagement - this should provide a positive impact on the community, allowing an informed community to advocate and take action for itself to better meet its needs.

Goals:

This website should serve multiple purposes to best serve our community including:

a citizen news site - with all the features that this entails. provide services to share and report news and events in a bilingual manner (ASL and English)

a community site -- enable engagement, contribution and participation.

a collaborative site -- enable cross collaboration with media, nonprofits, bloggers, etc and be a forum for community growth.

Transparency:
We recognize that in order to foster and protect a lively public sphere, it must operate without hidden agendas or biases. The principals of fairness and transparency is integral to all aspects of our organization.

We accept gifts, grants and sponsorships from individuals and organizations for the general support of our activities, but our news judgments are made independently on and not on the basis of donor support. Acceptance of financial support does not constitute implied or actual endorsement of donors or their products, services or opinions.

Donors and Sponsors:
In the interest of transparency, we will identify all major donors and sponsors who contribute over $1,000 and list them here.